By 1760 the population had exploded to four times as much...over one and half million. And the area of settlement had tripled since 1713.
Aside from river settlements and sporadic mining camps, frontiersmen who'd been leaving small footprints in the pristine wilderness, and the thirteen families who founded "Germantown," Pennsylvania in 1683, German settlement in colonial North America really commenced with the arrival of "Palatines" in 1709. These mostly settled in the colony of New York.
The winter of 1708-09 was credited as the worst in Europe in more than a century. Angus Baxter, in the book In Search of Your German Roots: A Complete Guide to Tracing Your Ancestors in the Germanic Areas of Europe tells us that the October-April of that winter proved a "total disaster."
"Palatine" really only applied to people from the Palatinate area of the Rhineland (now called Rheinland-Pfalz) but it was also used to describe people from Baden, Bavaria (Bayern), Alsace (Elsass), Hesse (Hessen) and Wurttemberg.
In late 1708 and into 1709 "Palatines" started to arrive in London, England via Rotterdam.
Many of those on the move were prepared to keep on journeying all the way to North America as representatives of "Pennsylvania" and the Carolina colonies had been active in the Rhineland...advertising good land and low taxes. In 1681, William Penn himself had visited the Rhineland and distributed leaflets offering land in Pennsylvania at a price of two English pounds per 100 acres (Baxter).
Meanwhile, the English government was trying to contend
with thousands of refugees pouring into temporary camps
and other temporary housing in London.
There were some 3000 protestants persuaded
to move to Ireland.
By January 1710, more than 2000 of these had settled in County Limerick
& County Dublin.
John Wesley, founder of Wesleyan religious movement visited County Limerick
in 1760 and found a German settlement at Killiheen (20 miles south of Limerick);
another at Ballybarane;
and a 3rd at Court Mattrass (a mile from Killiheen).
In England, the refugees were being accused of draining resources, stealing jobs,
and bringing plague and pestilence to the Mothercountry.
From the Fatherland the people flocked...the migration was part dispersion, part hearty hope for a future.
1708...
Reverend Joshua Kochertal arrives in North America after a nine week voyage at sea that started in mid-October. There were 41 people from Landau who were joined by 14 more from Landau and these decided to settle on the Hudson River in the New York colony at a settlement named Newburgh.
By mid-summer 1709:
Palatines arriving at Rotterdam
at a rate of 1000 per week;
many of these were shipped to England
on transport ships that "had brought soldiers over to the Netherlands
to fight in the War of Spanish Succession" (Baxter, 53).
September 1709--English worried about the number of Catholics
among the refugees and +/-3000 were sent back to the Rhineland
with a parting gift of 5 Dutch Guilders
January 1710
+/- 600 Palatines left for the Carolinas
Settlement of New Bern
By April another 3000 sailed for New York.
About 1800 of these settled on the Hudson
+/- 90 miles north of NYC;
the rest stayed in "the City."
Settlements at Albany
Schenectady
Schoharie on the Mohawk
Between 1712 and 1717 many settlers crossed into Pennsylvania.
Governor Spotswood and his "gay cavalcade" of
the Knights of the Golden Horseshoe
explored the Shenandoah Valley.
This opened up large sections of the Valley
and the Piedmont to settlement.
The Carolinas population increased sixteen fold from 1713-1760.
These pushed from the Tidewater to the Piedmont.
Others roaming around North America found Indian Trails and Mining Cart-Paths,
Military-Style Fort Treads, Natural Gaps, and a rather quiet "abandonment" of cultivation and homestead.
"Even by 1720 so much land had been taken up by these methods
that the only recourse for a poor man
who had not the wherewithal to satisfy a land speculator,
was to 'squat' without leave on Crown or proprietary land;
and if he did not move on to repeat the process,
selling out his improvements to a later comer
who had the means to pay, his descendants
had to wait until the Revolution
to secure a good title" (Growth of the American Republic,
Morison and Commager).
Back in the Fatherland...
Empresses and the impressed were being indentured and subjected to various population changes and proclamations.
This appeared largely as "civil disturbances" (like pillage, rape, starvation, fighting, and death).
Frederick the Great "of Prussia" (1740-1786) settled his areas with farmers.
Catharine the Great "of Russia" (1762-1796) made efforts to invite people with skills of any kind to Russia. These settlements were often unprotected against frequent attacks by the Ottoman Turks.
In North America, colonial pioneers were so angered by
the Quakers' refusal to allow them to use firearms
for protection
many of them left the Pennsylvania area.
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